Tuesday, September 1, 2015

On to Florianopolis: Brazil Part 13


After about 10 days in São Paulo, and our day trip to Rio, we headed to the airport and made our way to beautiful Florianopolis. 


Something that we loved about traveling in Brazil was the (required) preference given to not only people with disabilities, but also seniors, pregnant women, and mothers (or fathers I suspect) with young children. 

Maybe because this is their law, it also seems to be just a part of their culture. For example, people were so kind on subways and buses and almost always stood up to give a seat to one of us with the kids if there was space. At the airport, when the attendants would see our big group, they opened up a new lane just for us (this could be also that they knew other passengers wouldn't love waiting while they checked in 9 foreign passengers... :) Even the grocery stores had special lines (and as a mom with young children I thought this was pretty great!)


We landed after a short flight, and even got to enjoy a movie-star style departure down the steps attached to the plane!
Another interesting airport note: one (or more?) of our flights had us take a bus from the terminal where we were waiting directly out to the airplane. 



We arrived to find our two tiny rental cars waiting for us :) (and a friendly tour van driver who volunteered to chauffer our belongings and led the way to our rental house)


These guys kept themselves happily entertained while the grownups worked on checking in and getting everything with the cars all settled and situated. Then off we went...




To this lovely place! After researching what we could about Florianopolis, we narrowed down our housing search to the Jurerê  neighborhood. (We found this house using homeaway.com) We knew that Jurerê was one of the nicer areas of Florianopolis, but we didn't know exactly what that would mean (would it be modern? more rural? fancy or not-so-fancy?)  It turned out to be a very beautiful neighborhood with lots of really great homes with beautiful (gated, not walled!) yards  (though we still had some Brazilian wildlife: ants, mosquitios, a bat, something that loved to scurry around the roof above our room,  and even a cockroach (but just one, hooray!) Still it turned out to be a really great place to stay :)



Our street!


Lots of space to visit and relax and eat and play


And a great pool out front that the kids swam in nearly every day of our stay!

Up next: all the beaches and other Florianopolis fun